I remember reading somewhere years ago that flashing new firmware over and over will eventually wear out the hardware and cause it to slow down/eventually fail. I can't seem to find anything for this when searching though! Would it be possible for you to shed some light on what I should be searching for or what causes this issue?

I remember reading somewhere years ago that flashing new firmware over and over will eventually wear out the hardware and cause it to slow down/eventually fail. I can't seem to find anything for this when searching though! Would it be possible for you to shed some light on what I should be searching for or what causes this issue?

Thanks in advance!

there is something called read/write cycle life
you can only write info so many times onto a disk before it wears out and stops working

formatting a partition takes a huge amount of cycles, installing roms does the same too because its alot of data that has to write

Cheers for the reply! From what I read on the link, it says most flash memory have a P/E cycle of around 100,000 and from what I can remember, it varies depending on the type/quality of the flash memory used (Nexus 7 2012 had rubbish flash memory which a lot of people complained about). Just going off an assumption that the Z2 has a P/E cycle of 100,000, wouldn't it take quite a lot of ROM flashes before the memory deteriorates? Or is it more due to the size of the data being written/erased than the amount of times it is being done?

Sorry for the questions, I know this isn't the thread for it but it is interesting to me!

Cheers for the reply! From what I read on the link, it says most flash memory have a P/E cycle of around 100,000 and from what I can remember, it varies depending on the type/quality of the flash memory used (Nexus 7 2012 had rubbish flash memory which a lot of people complained about). Just going off an assumption that the Z2 has a P/E cycle of 100,000, wouldn't it take quite a lot of ROM flashes before the memory deteriorates? Or is it more due to the size of the data being written/erased than the amount of times it is being done?

Sorry for the questions, I know this isn't the thread for it but it is interesting to me!

I used to flash a lot roms everyday on various devices. I didn't notice any side effects of it. As I know a little about hardware there is nothing to fear. You can imagine than one memory cell is one bit of data. If it withstands 100 000 writes it literally means that you can save data (eg. flash rom on it) 100 000 times. There is no way that you can cross this number even with everyday flashing. And it doesn't matter how much data we are writing because each memory cell deteriorates individually, so if we write on 1000 cells it means that every cell will deteriorate only by one write operation which means every cell will still be able to be written 99 999 times.

Another thing is that the storage memory in smartphones is usually one chip which means that all your data including /system partition (which you overwrite during rom flashing) and your photos and music on /data are on one physical device. The conclusion is that if you are afraid of rom flashing and wiping you should also be afraid of saving photos to internal memory. And since we are using our int. memory and change files placed on it a lot it means that we can flash roms as we please without consequences.

I used to flash a lot roms everyday on various devices. I didn't notice any side effects of it. As I know a little about hardware there is nothing to fear. You can imagine than one memory cell is one bit of data. If it withstands 100 000 writes it literally means that you can save data (eg. flash rom on it) 100 000 times. There is no way that you can cross this number even with everyday flashing. And it doesn't matter how much data we are writing because each memory cell deteriorates individually, so if we write on 1000 cells it means that every cell will deteriorate only by one write operation which means every cell will still be able to be written 99 999 times.

Another thing is that the storage memory in smartphones is usually one chip which means that all your data including /system partition (which you overwrite during rom flashing) and your photos and music on /data are on one physical device. The conclusion is that if you are afraid of rom flashing and wiping you should also be afraid of saving photos to internal memory. And since we are using our int. memory and change files placed on it a lot it means that we can flash roms as we please without consequences.

Thanks for the thorough explanation. I had my suspicions this would be the case and you've driven it home by explaining the whole music/data/pictures scenario. I used to flash PA and other roms on my N4 more often than I care to count but I never once saw a decrease in performance so it's good to know (personally and for others) the phone's read/write performance is not going to be realistically affected!

"Most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand around 100,000 P/E cycles before the wear begins to deteriorate the integrity of the storage.[21] Micron Technology and Sun Microsystems announced an SLC NAND flash memory chip rated for 1,000,000 P/E cycles on 17 December 2008"

XDA Developers was founded by developers, for developers. It is now a valuable resource for people who want to make the most of their mobile devices, from customizing the look and feel to adding new functionality.Are you a developer?